


body & soul

by idekman



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2018-10-11
Packaged: 2019-07-29 13:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16265354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idekman/pseuds/idekman
Summary: She wakes up screaming his name and somehow, impossibly, he is there, at the foot of her bed.-Matt returns, Fisk gets revenge and Frank crawls in through her bedroom window late at night.





	body & soul

 

She wasn’t sure if her body was built for loving.

Streaks of bone and sinew and never quite still. It’s busy, filled to the brim with a noisy brain. No room for anything else. She sees love in films and learns it from books but when she sorts through the bones of her sternum and ribcage she can’t find space for it. Or inclination, or interest.

There’s Matt, of course. Matt, with his toothy, charming smile and kind eyes. Makes her stomach and fingers flutter. But when she sees a woman in his bed and wetness springs up in her eyes, it’s not until the door to his apartment clicks shut behind her that she realises they’re crocodile tears. Realises that her body is lying to her, teaching her responses learned from books about the vengeful fury of a woman scorned. 

The kind of love she likes to see best, the type that pushes down heavy on her chest so she can almost feel it inside, is the sad kind. Lost lovers separated by time, or distance. Or, simply, two people sharing a glance across a crowded room, yearning hard for one another but kept apart by circumstance. Ordinary people drowning in their own misery.

Karen Page is not an ordinary person.

She _is_ drowning, though. Her lungs fill with fluid and her ribcage expands, splinters, until wetness tears through her skin like tissue paper and she is pushed apart and pulled back together.

Fuck. When did she get so god damn _sad?_

-

Matt’s face stares at her from the doorway of her building.

He is caught in black and white. _Missing._ All-caps. His name underneath the photograph.

_M I S S I N G_

She tears it down, her fingernails catching on the door, leaving grooves. She spends the next hour picking flakes of paint and splinters out from under her nails.

-

She wakes up screaming his name and somehow, impossibly, he is there, at the foot of her bed.

She reaches out, blindly. Feels his hand under her skin and is shocked to find it warm. Real. Draws him in and pulls him onto the mattress, smells blood and smoke and the stale scent of sweat. Lets him lay a heavy arm over her waist and waits for the quick thud thud thud of her heart to die down.

 

Her bed sheets are stained with rust. One blink. Two. A swipe to clear bleary eyes and she realises it’s blood.

  

‘What are you doing here?’

Frank’s face is very close to hers and she gets to watch him crawl into waking. The honeyed, slow blink of his eyes. A nervous, frantic flick across her features as he registers her there – a quick jolt of panic, the sharpness of his shoulders as his hands scrabble ever-so-gently. Fingers finding bed sheets, bare toes finding her comforter, a quick sharp breath finding a wound that is slight and sparing. Finding himself in her bed. Safe. Not dead. A lazy slide back into restfulness. His eyes close again and he tilts his head away from her, towards the sun slanting in through the window.

‘I was close by,’ he slurs. ‘Heard you screaming. Wanted to check you were okay.’ 

She nods. It’s been hot in New York, and her apartment doesn’t have aircon; she’d left her bedroom window wide open. Frank hadn’t closed it when he’d come in and her white curtains reach out towards the bed, pulled back and forth by a gentle breeze. In. Out. In out. In time with her breaths. It’ll be a nice day out. 

‘You were calling for him,’ Frank mumbles into the crook of his elbow.

She hums, not quite hearing him, nestling into the paleness of her sheets. Quietly wishing he would put his arm around her again.

‘Murdock.’

When her eyes open his face is torn wide, eyes huge and lips parted. Her head rears back as if she’d been slapped. His expression shutters then, back to neutral with a blink. The vulnerability he’d allowed when her eyes were shut is gone now.

Like this, in her bed, against the paleness of her sheets, bruises here and there, he is like an entirely different person.

Her chest aches. She’s drowning.

-

‘I miss you,’ she says, aloud, to her apartment.

Stupid. Who the fuck is she talking to?

- 

Her body isn’t built for loving but when she thinks about Frank she hurts in odd places. Her wrists twinge. A pang of pain in her left ankle. The very tips of her fingers prickle and sweat. She catches her funny bone against her wardrobe door and the resultant static sensation that travels down the sharp edges of her arm brings him to the pointed forefront of her brain.

She has another dream. Doesn’t remember much of it. The sweeping pour of rain, slewing against her skin, pouring from her nose, her mouth, the sockets of her eyes, and she dissolves into it, swept away entirely - 

She wakes to the roll of thunder. Her window is wide open. A blurred silhouette is caught by a flash of lightning on the roof opposite. Broad shoulders and a wide stance. She shuts the window. Pulls the curtain to. Switches on the light and drags a kitchen chair to her bedroom. Rests her head against the glass and listens to the rain and the storm and falls asleep with her palm pressed up on the window pane, fingertips the last bit of her to fall away.

-

She drags herself to the office. Drags herself home. Drags herself to the office. Drags herself home. To the office. Back home. Office. Home. David Liebermann is in her office. David Liebermann is in her office. _David Liebermann is in her office –_

‘He’s gone.’

‘What do you mean, gone?’

‘I mean _gone._ ’

‘Dead?’ Her right kneecap constricts with pain.

‘Not necessarily. I just can’t find him.’ He waits. One. Two. ‘Is he with you?’

‘No.’

‘ _Shit._ ’

-

She screams Frank’s name in her sleep.

Matt crawls in through her window. 

-

She regards him carefully.

He looks up at her. All in black, cloth wrapped round his eyes. Each time he pitches a breath in he wheezes a little. Woozily, he raises a hand. Pools of blood, diluted from the rain, still raging, seeps into her carpet. Still alive then, though only just.

‘I had my suspicions,’ she tells the room. And then - ‘Who do I call?’

 

A woman she doesn’t know comes to the door. Fixes Matt. Leaves. Matt says very little.

She gives him twenty-four hours. He sleeps through most of them. Still says very little. David Liebermann texts her eleven times.

-

Frank. Frank. Frank. Frank.  _Frank. Frank. Frank Frank Frank Frank F r a n k –_

‘Hey.’ The doorway holds Matt up. She is dragged into wakefulness and she comes to noisily, an aborted scream and then a gasp at the dark silhouette against the orange light of the hallway – but it’s Matt, only Matt. No one to fear. Her left big toe throbs, as if she’d stubbed it.

‘Are you okay?’

Stupid question. She stares up at the ceiling and waits for everything to slow down again.

-

Her body isn’t built for loving but she wakes up to day three of Matt Murdock in her apartment and her wrists are so weak she can’t open the water bottle she keeps by her bed. Wrestles with it for a moment before finally giving up.

Ten minutes later she can open it, of course. She’s fine. _You’re fine._

She replies to Liebermann. Tells him she’s working on it. Calls Ellison to let him know she has a particularly explosive bout of food poisoning and won’t be in the office for at least forty-eight hours.

_Make a pot of coffee. Wake Matt. Tell him he can help her find Frank or he can leave. Find Frank._

It takes them sixteen hours.

 

Fisk had taken him out of the city. (Smart).

She takes her bed sheets out of the laundry, but they’re still stained with blood and they still smell like Frank. Just a bit. He smokes, constantly, in her apartment, and the scent has sunk into her furniture. She buries her face into her sofa cushion, inhales deeply, then finishes folding the bed sheet and texts Liebermann again.

Waits until Matt is sleeping. Packs a pistol and her car keys and a pack of gum. Drives upstate.

-

Fisk explains his plan to him as blood dribbles down the side of his face.

He is chained to a chair. He has a gun shot wound in his arm that, if he is correct, has about twelve hours before infection sets in. 

He has roughly three lacerations in his chest, not including a stab wound that has been shoddily sewn up. So they’re keeping him alive, at least.

The head wound is the worst of it, a sharp blow to his temple that had knocked him out cold. His whole skull thuds.

Fisk’s plan is simple. It doesn’t take too long to explain and ain’t that a blessing?

_Take Frank. Wait for Karen to come find him. Kill Karen. Kill Frank._

There are some erroneous details, of course, because Fisk is a natural orator with a penchant for drama. Karen will get seven shots, for the seven shots she loaded into a man called James Wesley, whom Frank has never heard of. The shots will be carefully placed so that Karen doesn’t die instantly, but instead bleeds out. Frank will be killed in the chair he is currently sat in, so that she can see. Frank will be killed quickly, with a shot to the head, because Fisk has no issues to take with him. In fact, he views the entire situation as quite unfortunate. He likes Frank. It is a shame he has to die, apparently.

Frank lets his head roll way, way back to stare at the ceiling. Most people would have brought Frank to a warehouse. Somewhere dramatic, hidden away.

They’re in the basement of a restaurant. There’s a collection of disused chairs in one corner. The lighting is strange – yellow against one wall, green against another. Something out of a nightmare. Fisk sits at one end of the long table between them, Frank at the other. A gun lies between them. Fisk catches him eyeing it at and inclines his head carefully.

‘That was James’ mistake.’

Carefully, he straightens his shoulders. Shifts himself as much as he can until he is sat upright. Regards Fisk carefully. Spits a mouthful of blood and saliva to the floor besides him.

‘What was?’ He asks. It’s the first time he’s spoken since he woke up in the chair. His voice is gravel.

‘Leaving the gun in reach.’ He pauses. Tilts his head to one side. ‘And not chaining her up, I suppose.’

- 

The closer she gets to the address Liebermann had sent to her, the more familiar it becomes. Once she realises where she is, she begins to hurt all over. A slow, agonising scream of pain at the base of her spine. The tips of her hipbones, the low curve of her pelvis. Her shins.

Whoever is waiting to pull her from the car finds her limp. She can’t fight any more. She is tired and she knows that what has been waiting for her has finally come and her body is not built for loving but it has always been built for survival. Since she was a child, since hiding in a closet from her father, since moving to New York and the myriad of miseries she has endured since.

It betrays her now.

-

They bring Karen in with a black hood over her head but he sees the blonde spill of her hair from under it and he has been thinking, for the last eight hours or so, how to get out of this. Fisk comes towards him with his own hood and the world goes black around him and he realises there is no way out of this. He and Karen are going to be shot like dogs in this small basement room.

The gun presses numbly against his temple. Fisk is talking.

 _Karen,_ he breathes – and then louder,

‘Karen.’

Fisk is still talking. Rams the gun into his head but he tries again. Can’t seem to stop the words spilling out of him.

‘Karen. Karen, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’ll be alright. It’s going to be okay –’ and he can hear her calling for him, his name skittering across the table, muffled, slightly, by her hood, but there, wracked and hooked, ‘– fine, you’ll be just fine, you hear me Miss Page?’ Louder, now, because Fisk’s voice is raising, his monologue coming to an end, and Frank has to shout to be heard as the gun digs further into the soft flesh of his temple, ‘you hear me? Karen, I –’

 

Her body is not built for loving but she hears the bullet ring out and the heavy thud of a body falling to the floor and she explodes outwards, pouring out in sharp fragments, every inch of her skin on fire with pain as the smell of blood and dying things hits her and Frank _– Frank –_

‘Hey!’

A heavy hand on her shoulder. Low voice shushing her, warm fingers peeling the hood off from her head. A touch to the base of her skull, her neck, her jaw – checking for injuries. She reaches out, blindly, for a moment. Catches against soft material and forces her eyes open.

Fisk, on the floor. Eyes glassy and cold.

Frank, across the table, body wriggling furiously, chains rattling. Very much alive. He’s screaming through gritted teeth, she realises, and she chokes, drowns, on a sob. He still has the hood on. Matt stands above her, a gun in one hand.

Fisk on the floor. Matt with the gun. Frank, roaring. Screaming her name, _screaming_ –

‘Hey, hey.’ She pulls the hood from his head, waits for the cold, animal fear to bleed from his eyes so he can take her in. Her fingertips pulse with pain but she places her palm against his jaw and lifts his chin, just slightly, so he sees her. ‘I’m okay. I’m right here.’ And then, because his eyes are still skittering wildly and his hands are shaking so hard his shoulders move with the effort of it, she pulls him to her, as close as she can get, his forehead to her clavicle, and waits for the reality of their still being alive to sink in.

-

‘Thank you,’ Karen tells Matt on the drive home. Frank is in the front with her, fast asleep but with his hand on her knee, fingers wrapped up slightly in the material of her skirt. Her body isn’t made for loving but the spot where his knuckle is rested against her bare leg burns and burns and burns.

‘It’s alright.’

She thinks of Fisk’s body laid out on the floor of the basement where she’d shot James Wesley. How, after they’d gotten Frank out of the chair and talked him down, once his heartbeat had slowed under the palm of her hand and he’d started breathing regular again, she’d crouched down next to the body. Alive, Wilson Fisk had had the same coldness as a shark, black eyes and a sneer. Dead, he was just a heavy body with his head caved in at the side, the grey folds of his brain displayed to the room.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

In the car mirror, she watches Matt’s jaw grind. He shakes his head. He hadn’t looked at the body. Had stood the other side of the room and carefully kept his gaze away. 

‘No.’ 

She nods. Presses on the gas a little harder to get them home.

-

Back at her apartment, Frank buries his face into the crook where her neck meets her shoulders and sobs.

-

 

‘If that happens again, Karen – you stay away, alright? You stay well, well away. Leave me to whatever bastard managed to get me, y’hear me? Karen?’

 _Fat fucking chance,_ she thinks. And then tells him so.

-

She wakes up to screaming and Matt sat at the end of the bed. It takes a moment to realise she’s the one screaming, and another moment to force herself to stop.

‘Sorry,’ she breathes out, voice ragged. Matt shrugs and folds his legs under himself. He’s not dressed as the Devil, for once, and he’s not covered in blood. He’s just Matt, a big green puffer coat thrown on over what look to be his pyjamas, hair a little dishevelled. 

‘It’s alright.' 

‘Couldn’t sleep?’ 

He shakes his head, then amends; 

‘I heard you from my apartment. Thought I’d drop by and check you were okay.’

That still sends a shiver down her spine – that he can hear her from across Hell’s Kitchen, can pick out her voice from thousands. Sometimes she wonders if he can hear her thoughts, too. Wonders how deep it goes. Can he hear her skin cells growing and replenishing? The snaps of her synapses, the quiet hum of her oxygenating blood cells?  

‘What happens in Frank’s body when you talk about me?’

The question comes out without thought or any particular impulse on her part, but once it’s there, hanging on a fine wire between them, she realises she’s wanted to know ever since she discovered Matt was Daredevil, that he could read people in a way no one else can. It’s been itching at her, a horrible, sick sort of curiosity.

Matt sighs at her. Readjusts his glasses slightly.

‘Karen –’

‘You must talk about me,’ she tells him, and at his silence presses onwards; ‘are you trying to tell me I haven’t come up even once?’

‘You really want to know?’

She peers at him in the dim light, then reaches over and snaps on her bedside lamp, filling three a.m. with a warm honey-glow.

‘Yes.’

He nods. Recrosses his legs; gets comfortable. Like this, they’re almost children; little kids staying up past their bed time to talk about boys. Karen pulls her legs up to her chest, chin resting on her knees.

‘Do you know the scientific explanation behind getting butterflies in your stomach?’

She shakes her head.

‘It’s when blood is pumped away from your stomach to your limbs after a surge of adrenaline. Your body – it thinks you’re scared, that you have to run away from something, so your flight-or-fight instinct is triggered.’ Matt pauses a beat, levels his gaze towards her. Behind the red-glazed window of his glasses, she can just about make out his eyes, blinking slowly up at her. His voice, when he starts up again, is hesitant. ‘That’s what happens to Frank. Every single time he sees you.’

‘Oh.’ 

Karen falls back against her pillows, all her breath and hope and words caught up in a tight space at the top of her chest.

‘Oh,’ she says again.

‘Do you want to know more?’ 

‘There’s more?’

Matt nods.

‘No. No, it’s okay. I have to go.’

 

She comes back into the room a few moments later, one shoe on her foot, the other in her hand, coat on over her ratty pyjama top and sweats.

‘Do you know where he is?’ She asks. Long-suffering, Matt sighs. 

‘Gimme a sec.’

 

She finds him up on the high line.

She didn’t even know it opened this early – the sky is still a soft, dawn-blue, warmth beginning to creep across with touches of pink and orange but the air still retains that early-morning chill. It must be about five a.m.

But here he is, sat on a bench. He’s found just the spot where he can see through the brownstones that surround them for a narrow, long view of the city and he’s staring at it. Just sat there, silent, not even aware that she’s a few steps away now, cheap coffee cup in one hand. His elbows are slung up on the back of the bench and he seems, if not content, at least halfway there.

‘Frank?’

His head snaps round and his expression, unusually unguarded, snaps back and forth; surprise to bemusement to amusement before finally settling on happiness. A small little smile that tugs at the corner of his mouth.

‘Karen,’ he responds, half-laughing, ‘what are you –’

‘Whenever I see you, the palms of my hands get pins and needles.’

Frank stares at her. One beat. Two.

‘What?’

‘Whenever I see you, the palms of my hands get pins and needles,’ she repeats slowly, as if he hadn’t heard her the first time round. ‘Do you know what I mean? When your hands kind of prickle and sweat a tiny bit. It kind of hurts and you get – you get –’ and here she can’t help herself, breaking off into a giant grin, splintering her face, the high line, the world in two, as she tells him, ‘you get butterflies in your stomach. That’s how I feel, when I see you.’

‘Karen, what are you saying?’

She gives him a moment. Gives herself a moment. Swoops in a giant breath, the sort you take before jumping in the pool, readying herself for the cold crash of the water.

‘I’m saying I love you.’

She gets one last microsecond before she hits the water. Before Frank springs to his feet and comes to her, moving faster than she’s ever seen him. Before he wraps his arms around her waist, so tight he practically lifts her off her feet, and kisses her with a ferocity that bruises, that she feels in her chin, her jaw, in the throbbing pulse at her neck.   

‘I love you,’ she tells him again, when they come up for air, her entire body one giant, sensitive bruise, all of her pulsing and burning and aching. He pulls away, hair wild, eyes wild, _mouth_ wild, his lips swollen and red and beautiful.

‘Jesus, Karen, I – of course. I love you, I love you, I love you,’ he tells her, voice split in two, and she feels herself bursting into a million tiny pieces across the New York High Line.

**Author's Note:**

> this ending (and title) brought to you by Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice and that bit where Matthew McFayden goes 'I love - I love - I love you' which I ripped off pretty much wholesale.   
> Jon Bernthal would make a great Darcy?? we need a kastle pride and prejudice au?????  
> Come say hi on tumblr @ hipsterfrankcastle   
> ps i know the high line doesn't open until seven am don't AT ME!!!!!


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